Sunday, December 18, 2016

Disagreeing with Trump to placate academia

That is the opening for those of us who disagree with Mr. Trump. It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option. ...

... anxiety from a shrinking white majority ... doesn’t have to be our destiny.

Mr. Trump’s victory must make all Americans acknowledge that the choice of embracing or rejecting multiculturalism is not abstract. I know this better than most, because I’ve followed both paths. It is the choice of embracing or rejecting our own people.

R. Derek Black is a graduate student in history, focusing on the early Middle Ages.

My guess is that he realized that he will never get a Medieval History PhD unless he repudiates use of terms like White Genocide. So he writes this essay in coded language.

The NY Times would only publish this essay if he denounces Trump and nationalists. So he does that, and slips in phrases like "greatest assault on our own people" and "choice of embracing or rejecting our own people."

A specter is haunting the Internet?—?the specter of the “alt-right.” ...

The Alt-Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.

The next four years are going to be a very difficult time for many people. But if we’re not careful, it could be a dangerously easy time for those who study ancient Greece and Rome. Classics, supported by the worst men on the Internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige within the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.

This is my call to arms for all classicists. ...

When you hear someone — be they a student, a colleague, or an amateur — say that they are interested in Classics because of “the Greek miracle” or because Classics is “the foundation of Western civilization and culture,” challenge that viewpoint respectfully but forcefully. Engage them on their assumed definitions of “foundation,” “Western,” “civilization,” and “culture.” Point out that such ideas are a slippery slope to white supremacy. Seek better reasons for studying Classics. ...

As the Alt-Right becomes more vocal and normalized, we may face pressure to frame our research and teaching in a way that will appeal to this new audience of Classics enthusiasts. Resist that pressure.

So I guess studying the Classics or praising Western Civilization is just code for Nazi white supremacy. And hating Trump is just code for wanting to tear down Western Civilization.

But a sampling of his recent public comments suggest, at least, a highly Indo-Eurocentric worldview and an antipathy toward Islam. He is Iranian-American. ...

He also described the “political ideologies of liberalism, democracy and universal human rights” as “ill conceived” and “bankrupt.”

Regarding Islam, he said that “Nearly everything allegedly glorious about Islam was parasitically appropriated by Arabs and Turks for the Caucasian civilizations of greater Iran. Moreover, this parasitic appropriation of a mutilated Iranian civilization took place in the wake of a murderous campaign of rape, plunder and destruction that can only be described as history’s first and greatest white genocide.”

Apparently he needs to start badmouthing white ppl if he wants a career in academia.

Are his statements about Islam and Iran true or not? It is difficult to find out, if addressing the issue gets PhD philosophers ostracized as neo-Nazis.

In this fight, the alt-right has found a useful ally in the Red Pill community, which is also invested in portraying itself as the inheritors of the Western tradition. The alt-right is, in fact, quite small: ...

I’ve been lurking on various Red Pill sites for over a year now to do research for a book about how these men talk about ancient Greece and Rome. (Which they do, much more than one might expect. They are especially obsessed with the concept of Stoicism.) In that time, I’ve been an almost-daily visitor to the r/theredpill and r/mensrights subreddits, along with A Voice For Men, Return of Kings, and the personal blogs of some of the men one might call “thought leaders” in the community. When I started my research, none of these sites explicitly identified as alt-right — but gradually, over the course of the constantly worsening nightmare that has been 2016, most of them have aligned themselves with the movement to varying degrees.

The article calls "Nazi" 22 times.

To these white civilization haters, the nightmare of 2016 was that they were unable to destroy Donald Trump by calling him a Nazi.

Besides the Nazi name-calling, her biggest complaint is that the Alt Right is a new coalition of diverse ideologies that have come together to stop the Leftist destruction of Western Civilization, and they have gained enuf power to elect Trump:

The only way to understand the alt-right is to stopping thinking of it as a single monolithic entity and realize that it is a fragile coalition of hateful ideologies, of deplorable men using the internet to perform white masculinity by playacting as Nazis to feed on our fear.